Pageant Boys releases debut full length Haunted
Following his two EPs in 2017 and 2018, Pageant Boys (Alexander Sheppard) is set to release his first full-length LP, Haunted. It's a 10 track album that blurs the lines between glitchy soundscapes and pop songs.
Alexander Sheppard, a Kansas City-based musician, conceived and wrote very early versions of the songs that appear on Haunted nearly 10 years ago. However, that vision was only realized in 2020, during the height of quarantine. The songs on the album seem to echo the isolation and loneliness of the pandemic.
Haunted blurs the lines between soundscapes and pop songs. Sheppard knows how to write a melody, and places those melodies often over unsettling, sometimes Lynchian atmospheres. Moments of the record feel like they were lifted from a sci-fi film. Others feel intimate, like Sheppard’s soul is speaking to us directly.
The Sisyphean task of Haunted was marrying what Sheppard envisioned with what was coming out of the speakers. He says, “The problem I encountered in the writing and recording process was never writer’s block. The album was in a finished state for years, but I was unsatisfied with it. It took me years to be able to learn the skills that allowed me to reproduce the internal versions of the songs externally.” We know these stories all too well. Bruce Springsteen taking six months to finally stop working on his first hit single “Born to Run.” Or Lucinda Williams painfully going over and over every detail on her celebrated record Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. For fans of Pageant Boys, Haunted is well worth the wait.